One of the great questions
of Western history, if not the great question, is "Why
did Rome fall?" Reasonable answers to this most perplexing
of history's puzzles—and there have been hundreds of answers
advanced—begin with understanding the complex nature of
late Rome and the barbarian invasions in which the Roman Empire
ultimately drowned. Still, the failure of great minds like Edward
Gibbon to win over a majority of historians to the view he espoused
in his monumental work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, suggests we should seek perhaps another path and
examine the terms we're using to express the problem, especially
what we mean when we speak about "Rome falling." Indeed,
close study calls the very question into question. "Why did
Rome fall?" may be a line of inquiry that has no clear resolution
because the question itself is fundamentally flawed. It might
be better to ask, "Did Rome fall?"

After nearly half a millennium of rule, the Romans finally lost their
grip on Europe in the fifth century (the 400's CE). Their decline left
in its wake untold devastation, political chaos and one of the most fascinating
and problematical issues in history, what caused the "Fall
of Rome," the problem we'll tackle in this Chapter. Though
Roman government in the form of the Byzantine Empire survived in the East
for almost another thousand years, so-called barbarian forces overran
western Europe, spelling the end of an era. While Rome's absence in the
West brought with it tremendous change—and none of it seemed very
positive, at least at first—before we can even address the question
of why Rome logged off and Europe switched users, we must understand how
this transition happened and what exactly came to a close during this
period.

The
best way to answer that question is to look ahead to the changes which
Rome's demise produced. Within two centuries after its purported "fall"
in 476 CE—by the seventh century, that is—Europe looked very
different from the days when the Romans were in charge. By virtually every
measurable standard, Western Civilization had relapsed severely. Trade
had virtually disappeared, taking with it the European economy and the
basis of civilized life, and because most of the populace was by then
mired in dismal squalor, unable to travel or attend school, education
and literacy were all but relics of the past. Thus, without any way for
people to see their situation from a larger geographical or historical
perspective, a basic siege mentality gripped their world. On the surface,
the reason for all this seems fairly clear. The invasions of non-Roman
outsiders had so badly disrupted the region that, in the words of one
modern historian, it was as if "Western Civilization went camping
for five hundred years."

There is no better
way to bring home the impact of this grim reality than to look at Europe
in the early Middle Ages through a foreigner's eyes. In outlining the
peoples of the world for his contemporaries, an Arab
geographer of the day describes Europeans as having "large bodies,
gross natures, harsh manners, and dull intellects . . . those who live
farthest north are particularly stupid, gross and brutish." The tables
have certainly turned when outsiders are describing Western Civilization
the way classical historians like Herodotus and Tacitus had once appraised
the barbarian world. The sequence of events leading up to such drastic
changes, so precipitous a drop in quality of life, is where we must begin
as we seek the reasons for "why Rome fell."

II. The Barbarians Arrive: The Fourth
and Fifth Centuries CE

Increasing pressure from peoples outside the Empire, the much maligned
barbarians, had compelled the Romans in later antiquity
to let more and more foreigners inside their state. Since most of these
spoke a language based on Common Germanic,
the Romans referred to them collectively as Germans,
even though they actually represented a wide array of nations and cultures.
These newly adopted resident aliens were assigned to work farms or were
conscripted into the Roman army in numbers so large that the late Latin
word for "soldier" came to be barbarus
("barbarian"). And where these barbarians met resistance, they
sneaked or pushed their way inside the Empire, and in such a profusion
that Rome was fast turning into a nation of immigrants.

Not that that was much of a change. Things had actually been
that way for centuries, only by late antiquity it was undeniable that,
in spite of being called "Roman," the Empire was, in fact, a
multicultural enterprise. The pretense of a "Roman" Rome had
worn so thin it was impossible to maintain the illusion, for instance,
that everyone in the Empire could speak—or even wanted
to speak—Latin, the Romans' native tongue. Furthermore,
it had been ages since any emperor had even bothered to pretend his lineage
could be traced back to some ancestor who had arrived with Aeneas in Italy,
an invented history which was beginning to look rather silly when Spaniards
and North Africans had been steering the Empire for centuries.

The stark truth was that by the fifth century CE—and indeed for
many years before that—a succession of dynamic and capable foreigners
coming from all ends of the Empire had kept Rome on its feet and these
men were as "Roman" as anyone born or bred in the capital. Barbarians
were, and had been for a long time, guarding and feeding the Empire, which
made it all the more difficult to claim they shouldn't also be running
it. While three centuries earlier the Roman satirist Juvenal had lamented,
"I can't stand a Greek Rome," now Rome wasn't merely
Greek. It was Dacian and Egyptian and Syrian and, most of all, ever more
German by the day.

Thus, the sort of change which Rome had undergone—and was at the
time still undergoing which implies a certain trajectory into the future—was
all too clear: from a local stronghold in Italy, to a multinational power,
to the only superpower in the known world, to a globalized conglomerate
of many different peoples. Even if the Romans of Rome still held the title
to the Empire and affected superiority over the barbarians managing their
domain, Roman possession of the lands around the Mediterranean Sea was,
for the most part, only on paper. The reality was that the state was jointly
owned, a participatory experiment which was by then maintained with the
sweat and blood of many races—and there were even more who would
have liked to sign up as "Roman" but they couldn't get in.

This begs the question, then, why
so many foreigners lived—and even more wanted to live—in
Rome. Why did barbarians in such numbers press to invade an empire in
which they were treated as second-class citizens no matter how hard they
worked and collaborated? The answer is easy. The Roman Empire in that
day was a far safer place to live and offered much better accommodations
than the wild world outside its borders. Roads and aqueducts and baths
and amphitheaters and even taxes look good when one is gazing in from
outside where poverty, blood-feuds, disease and frost reign supreme—the
mild Mediterranean climate of southern Europe cannot be discounted as
a factor in the barbarians' desire to infiltrate sunny Rome—but
there was an even more impressive reason lurking beyond the borders of
the Empire, something anyone would want to avoid if at all possible: Huns!

A. The Huns, Part 1

Traveling
all the way from Mongolia in the Far East, the Huns
began encroaching on Europe sometime after 350 CE. Toughened by decades
of crossing the Russian steppes on small ponies, these marauding Asiatic
nomads spread terror far and wide, developing a reputation for insurmountable
ferocity. That led easily to exaggerated reports of their speed and numbers.
Indeed, there's little that isn't exaggerated about the Huns,
which amounts to a serious problem for historians, how to sift the facts
from the frenzy. And besides that, there's an even greater problem. In
all the history of the Huns, no Hun ever speaks to us in his own voice,
because no Hun ever wrote history.

All in all, the Huns represent that rare instance
where the victors didn't write the history, because—the
conclusion is inescapable—they
didn't care enough about history to write it. As a result, their reputation
has suffered. It's very odd, really. Conquerors usually find it useful
in maintaining their dominion, to make at least some public declaration
or justification of their conquest, some sort of excuse for invading and
conquering. Many subscribe to invented histories, forging a historical
right or reason they slaughtered and marauded, if not out of a guilty
conscience, at least from a victor's sense of shame. That the Huns didn't
even bother lying to those they conquered, or even to posterity, is without
doubt one of their most frightening qualities. And so, much like our Western
ancestors, many historians run in terror just at the sound of the name.

B. The Goths

Those
barbarian tribes who lived furthest east in Europe were the first to feel
the sting of the Huns' assault from Asia, in particular, the Goths,
a loose confederation of Germanic peoples living northeast of the Balkan
mountains, who were hit so hard and quickly by these savage marauders,
that they were split into two groups: the Ostrogoths
("Eastern Goths") and the Visigoths ("Western
Goths"). By 376 CE, the Ostrogoths had fallen completely in Hunnic
hands, where they would be victimized and enslaved for nearly a century.

The Visigoths, severed from their brethren but saved from the brunt of
the Mongol assault by the mere fact that they lived further west than
the Ostrogoths, desperately sought protection by appealing to Rome for
asylum. There, they ran up against an impermeable shield of customs stations
at the Roman border, a veritable wall of imperial disdain which was by
then standard policy when barbarians began wailing and waving their hands.
Thus squeezed between scorn and the spear, the Visigoths panicked and
not a few tried to push their way into Roman territory. Facing a surge
of frantic immigrants, the Roman Emperor Valens had little
choice but to relent and let them in.

Once inside the boundaries of Rome, the Visigoths found safety but at
the same time a new and in many ways more dangerous foe. As new-comers
to Roman civilization, they were ill-equipped to live in a state run on
taxes and mired in the complex language of legalities, and thus made easy
prey for unscrupulous, greedy imperial bureaucrats who cheated and abused
them. Very quickly, the Visigoths found themselves bound in something
heavier and more constricting than chains—the gruesome coils of
red tape—and they responded as any reasonable barbarian would: they
demanded fair treatment and, when their pleas went unheard, they embarked
upon a rampage.

Valens called out his army, a threat meant to intimate
the Visigoths into returning to their designated territory and tithe.
But like the truant step-children they were, the barbarians remained disobedient.
Left with no other recourse but corporal punishment, Valens met the Visigoths
in combat at the Battle of Adrianople (378 CE) in northeastern
Greece, and what happened was not only unexpected but unthinkable to any
Roman living then, or dead. Primed by the insults to their pride—or
because they were simply scared out of their minds—the
Visigoths defeated and massacred the Roman legions sent to keep them
in their room. Worse yet, Valens himself was killed in the course of the
conflict.

His successor, Theodosius I resorted to standard Roman
policy and pacified the Visigoths temporarily with handouts and promises.
But money and titles couldn't buy back a Roman army or, more important,
a reputation for invincibility. The Romans' essential weakness was now
in full public view. Still, Theodosius managed to hold the state together
and keep up a tense façade of peace within the Empire until, through
an act which proves the cruel capriousness of fate, he died prematurely
in 395. His young, pampered, feeble-minded sons were suddenly thrust to
the forefront of Roman politics, yet another disaster for the Romans who
could really have done without one at that juncture in history.

Those
children, Arcadius and Honorius who
were both still in their teens, were ill-prepared to hold real power.
When a strong, new leader named Alaric rose to power
among the Visigoths and started advancing on the West, Honorius panicked
and recalled the Roman legions stationed on the Rhine river, Rome's northern
border,which opened the door for other barbarians to force their way inside
the Empire. A confederation of Germanic tribes, the Vandals,
poured across the border—crossing the Rhine during the particularly
cold winter of 406 when the river had frozen to an uncustomary depth—and
ranged freely about the every-day-less-Roman province of Gaul. After a
while, the Vandals settled in Spain. This rendered pointless the Romans'
military outposts in Britain that protected what was
up till then the northwestern boundary of their domain, so the Romans
withdrew from the island, as it turned out permanently. Germanic tribes
seized the opportunity to occupy Britain, particularly the Angles
and the Saxons. Leaks were fast becoming floods.

His mind poisoned by court intrigue and the jealousy of rivals, Honorius
struck a serious blow to his own cause by allowing the assassination of
his best general, a man named Stilicho, in 408. So, with the Roman Emperor
having done him the favor of eliminating his best defense against them,
Alaric and his Visigothic forces invaded Italy with brutal barbarian dispatch
and headed for the city of Rome itself. Panicking again, Honorius abandoned
the capital, evading the Visigoths by fleeing to another Roman city in
Italy, Ravenna, where he watched and waited out their wrath from a safe
distance.

Now
unprotected, the eternal city, the heart of the Roman Empire, took the
full brunt of the Visigoths' rage. In this infamous Visigothic
Sack of Rome (410 CE) Alaric and his comrades plundered the city
for three days, a devastation which turned out to be actually less physical
than psychological but, even so, a wound which went deep into the heart
of an already ailing state. When Saint Jerome, the great Latin translator
of the Bible, heard the news of the Visigoths' capture of Rome, he wrote
"My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth." The shock was indeed
registered in deafening silence empire-wide.

At the same time, however, not everything went wrong for the Romans.
For one thing, Alaric died only a few months after leading his forces
on Rome. This left the Visigoths without competent leadership and, more
important, still in search of a land they could settle and call home.
After some negotiations, the remnants of their army and people moved out
of Italy to southwestern Gaul, and later Spain where with the help of
the Roman army they displaced the Vandals and established a kingdom that
would endure for nearly two centuries. While barbarian in origin, the
Visigoths of Spain quickly adopted Roman customs, the Latin language,
and even the Christian religion, though in a heretical variation called
Arian Christianity (or Arianism; see
Section 13). Although that later caused
trouble between the Visigoths and the orthodox Church in Rome, this late-ancient
civilization laid the groundwork for much of Medieval Spanish culture
to follow, forging a unique synthesis of barbarian, Roman, Christian and—after
711 CE when Islamic forces invaded Spain—Moslem traditions.

C. The Huns, Part 2

All this time, the Huns were marching through and enslaving eastern
Europe, inflicting their own brand of terror on the barbarian tribes there.
Oppressing peoples like the Ostrogoths had kept these Mongol nomads, by
now only distantly Asiatic, occupied for several decades. Empires like
the Huns are run on conquest and collecting tribute from terrified populaces.
They must keep expanding or their momentum falters and their economy as
well, if it's fair to say terrorists have economies. Fear, in fact, plays
a large part in maintaining any such regime, so when the Huns' new, powerful,
European-born leader Attila learned that Christians in
Rome had pronounced him, in traditional Old-Testament fashion, "the
Scourge of God"—meaning God's whip
as a moralizing force to impose better behavior—he was very pleased
and added it to his litany of royal titles. No doubt, the whip image appealed
to him more than the moralizing part.

Sweeping
west across the Rhine River into Gaul, Attila's forces met a Roman army
near Châlons (central Gaul) in 451 CE and, against
all odds, the Huns were defeated. Infuriated and apparently under-educated
in military protocol, the Hunnic general took the loss as an insult, a
challenge of sorts, and wheeled south heading for Italy. The Romans in
panic fled at his approach. Even the Emperor Valentinian III
abandoned the capital—shades of Honorius!—but the leader of
the Church, Pope Leo I, not only stood his ground but
went to face down Attila in person. In one of the most remarkable moments
in history (452 CE), they actually did meet and speak, but only
in private. In the wake of their discussion, Attila wheeled about yet
again, this time leaving Italy never to return. Leo's words must have
contained some powerful magic. Too bad there's no record of what
he said.

Shortly thereafter, Attila died of uncertain causes. Because his death
occurred the night after he'd celebrated a new marriage—the last
of many!—his young bride was suspected of complicity in his demise
but the charge was never proven. And, as has happened so often in history,
where the Italians failed to save their land, Italy itself rose to the
challenge, shades of Greece and the Persian Wars! In this instance, the
Hunnic army contracted some type of epidemic during their brief stay on
the Italian peninsula. This mystery disease decimated their ranks, and
soon after their departure they disappeared completely, from Europe and
history. As one modern writer notes, "They were not mourned."

D. The Vandals

Following
their expulsion from Spain at the hands of the Visigoths and Romans, the
Vandals fled to the northwest corner of Africa (modern Morocco). Once
there, their wily and double-dealing leader Gaiseric helped them expand
their domain by uprooting Roman control over the rich provinces of North
Africa—the Vandals' imminent approach on Carthage (modern Tunisia)
in 430 CE is one of the last pieces of news Saint Augustine heard as he
lay on his deathbed—but their devastation to Rome was more than
economic. Quite a few Christians living in this area were slain by the
Vandals who ironically belonged to the same faith but as Arian Christians
were strongly opposed to those who swore allegiance to the Pope. Indeed,
more than one of the gruesome hagiographies ("saints'
biographies") heroizing early Christian martyrs stems from the carnage
which ensued as the Vandals—fellow Christians!—spread across
North Africa, murdering their holy brethren.

Next, moving to sea, the Vandals took up piracy and severely disrupted
trade in the western Mediterranean. The recent assassination of Aetius,
who was the most competent Roman general in the day and had died at the
hands of none other than Valentinian III, the Emperor of Rome himself,
only made the Vandals' path to naval power and domination all the easier.
This horrifying replay of Stilicho's death—shades of Honorius again!—not
only led to Valentinian's own murder in retaliation for Aetius' but also
opened the way for a second assault on the capital itself, the devastating
Vandalic Sack of Rome in 455 CE. Unlike the Visigoths'
earlier siege, the Vandals' attack involved prolonged, physical ruin,
a destruction so complete and indiscriminate, so emblematic of wanton
atrocity, that these barbarians' very name made its way into common parlance,
and ultimately English, as a by-word for "the malicious destruction
of property," vandalism.

E. The "Fall
of Rome"

The final days of the Roman Empire are usually assigned to the year
476 CE, when the German general Odovacar (or Odoacer)
deposed the "last Roman Emperor," a
boy ironically namedRomulus Augustulus. Although
Odovacar acted with little respect for formalities—he removed the
child from the throne and sent him off to a monastery where he subsequently
died—the usurper faced no real opposition, political or military.
The reality of the matter was that barbarian leaders like him had been
the power behind the throne for many years in Rome, and the German strongman
did little more than end the pretense of non-barbarian control of the
Roman West.

His move was, moreover, driven by economics as much as anything else.
Despite the travails of their Western counterparts, the Eastern emperors—by
then, there were two Roman emperors, one in Rome and one in Constantinople—continued
to demand that the entire Empire pay taxes into a common treasury. From
there, few of these funds ever made their way back to the West where they
were desperately needed to defend the state and rebuild its infrastructure.
In open defiance of this tradition, Odovacar began keeping the monies
he collected from those areas he governed.

The
luxury-loving emperors of the East were incensed to find their outstretched
hands empty and responded in a manner consistent with standard Roman policy
in the day. They hired barbarians to do their dirty work. In 493, Theodoric,
the leader of the Ostrogoths who had at last been liberated from Hunnic
dominion, was commissioned to head west and dispatch Odovacar, which he
did in typically savage fashion. In the course of negotiating peace with
his barbarian brother at a banquet, Theodoric stabbed him to death.

But once he'd had a good look at the West, especially the desperate condition
of things, the Ostrogothic general refused to hand Italy over to some
far-off "Roman Emperor" who had no intention of actually ruling
it but only milking it for taxes. Now the lord of the land, Theodoric
(r. 493-527 CE) set about restoring what more than a century of neglect,
civil war, invasion and "vandalism" had wrought. Roman Italy
needed a caring hand like his, and this barbarian proved the last ruler
in antiquity to lend it such.

Theodoric oversaw the repair of Roman roads and aqueducts, and under
his governance Italy witnessed a small-scale renaissance, sadly its final
breath of culture for much of the remaining millennium. To those who are
able to grasp the complexity of these times, Theodoric's actions come
as no surprise at all. A veritable paradox, capable of both treachery
and tenderness, he had been educated in Constantinople but remained essentially
illiterate all his life. Moreover, he had served in his youth as a hostage
to the Eastern Romans and thus had learned the language of those highly
civilized bureaucrats. And like Odovacar, he was also a Christian and,
although Arian, managed to maintain good relations with the orthodox powers-that-be,
not that he wanted to live among them.

To this day, however, his strained relations with his secretary Boethius,
an orthodox Christian, dominate the accounts of his regime—Theodoric
ultimately had Boethius executed—but the Ostrogothic king would
be better remembered for building a sound and effective government centered
in Ravenna (northeastern Italy on the coast of the Adriatic Sea), where
his tomb can still be seen. It is fairer to him, perhaps, to recall his
relationship with Cassiodorus, Boethius' successor to
the post of secretary, who was also an orthodox Christian but not so contentious
a man. Cassiodorus quietly oversaw the copying of many Classical manuscripts,
which was an important contribution to the preservation of Greek and Roman
literature and thought during the Middle Ages. All in all, whether or
not any of them knew it—and quite a few probably did—these
men were folding the tents of culture, packing its bags and quenching
the fires of scholarship. The West was readying itself for its Medieval
"camping trip."

III. The "Fall of Rome" as a Question of History

A. 1 Question, 210 Answers

The classic conundrum of antiquity, "Why did Rome fall?," has
withstood legions of scholars catapulting answers at it—over 210
different ones at last count—and still it stands unbreached. Few
of the suggestions have made much of an impression. Many involve "invented
histories" of some sort, speaking volumes about the answerer and
syllables about the issue. More than one may be dismissed off-hand as
so far from what-really-happened that, though they represent someone's
history, it's clearly not the Romans'.

For instance, Rome did not fall because of the distractions pursuant
to sexual indulgence. Given the influence of Christianity which the Romans
had adopted as their exclusive religion by then, the conduct of those
living in the fifth century after Christ was relatively sober. Indeed,
if the data point to any venereal villains across the great expanse of
Roman history, it is the Julio-Claudians who oversaw the height of Roman
power in the first century CE and were truly perpetrators of immorality
at large. So, to make an argument relating sexual behavior to Rome's "fall"—and
to judge it fairly from the historical evidence—involves the ludicrous
conclusion that the erotic felonies of a Caligula or Nero, in fact, sustained
Rome's triumph, instead of corroding it at its core. That suggests that,
to prevent the collapse of their society, the Romans should have kept
the orgies up, so to speak, which is patently ridiculous.

Simply
put, sex—reproduction maybe, but not sex!—had little or nothing
to do with the troubles that brought the Romans to their collective knees
in later antiquity. Likewise, the climate and ecology of the time cannot
be adduced as the reason for something so earth-shattering as the "Fall
of Rome." Nor do any of the other two hundred or so entries cited
make the cut in history's time trials, meaning that no one answer has
as yet won the day for why the Romans lost. All may have appealed to some
but none to all or, more to the point, a majority of scholars.

And some of these answers have come from very good scholars, the likes
of Edward Gibbon, the pre-eminent classical historian
of England in the later half of the eighteenth century. Brilliant though
it was, the thesis he expounded in his monumental and highly engaging
magnum opusThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—he
argued that the rise of Christianity emasculated the native vigor of Rome,
leaving it open to more virile conquerors, i.e. barbarians—is a
proposition full of holes and inconsistencies, saying in the end less
about the Roman Empire than its British counterpart, the hidden target
of Gibbon's book. For example, if Christianity so weakened the Roman West
in late antiquity, why didn't it weaken the other half, the staunchly
orthodox East which survived nearly a millennium after the collapse of
the West? Perhaps it's true that Christianity redirected the attention
of many Romans away from affairs of state, but it did not undermine their
civilization. To the contrary, it was as natural an outgrowth of their
culture, as "Roman" as all sorts of other things they did: theatre,
epic poetry, gladiators, ship-building, all of which were imports, just
like Christianity.

B. The Evidence

Any hope of finding a better answer depends on assessing exactly what
was happening in Rome at the time of its "fall" and the data
do, in fact, point to some clear and significant trends.

Population. First of all, there's strong evidence
of a steady decline in population across the entire Empire from the
second century CE on. For example, peaking at around a million or so
in the Classical Age, the population of the city of Rome gradually dropped
over the course of the next few centuries, reaching a low point of a
mere six thousand by the 500's. The reasons for this drastic if incremental
reduction in human resources are not clear, though many Romans' luxurious
lifestyle and their concomitant disinterest in producing and raising
children must have played some part. So did plagues, no doubt, as well
as constant warfare on the frontiers and perhaps even lead-poisoning,
evidenced in human skeletal remains recovered from Pompeii which show
that the Romans there were indeed exposed to high concentrations of
the lethal element. Nevertheless, it's unclear how widespread this problem
was.

Economics. Second, economic data
point to other factors which doubtlessly contributed to the situation.
Well-documented among the travails of third-century Rome—a full
two centuries prior to its notorious "fall"—is a particularly
long period of financial crisis which inaugurated the slow collapse
of the economy in the West. This economic depression was due in large
part to the failure of the Romans' system of conquest and enslavement.
When the flow of cheap slaves began
to dry up, estates throughout the Empire could no longer live off the
abuse of human resources on which they had formerly depended. So without
any real industry or much agricultural machinery to work the land—Roman
land-owners did know about water wheels and windmills but archaeologists
have found evidence of very few being used in this period—the
aristocrats of late Rome apparently watched the collapse of their economy
and disdained practical matters such as retooling their farms to ensure
their viability.

Politics.
Finally, political affairs contributed to the difficulties plaguing late
Rome. The general incompetence of emperors and the failure of traditional
politics in the West led to a wretchedly corrupt political structure,
characterized by an oppressive burden of taxation levied to support the
growing army of soldiers (barbari!) who were bribed—"employed"
is too sophisticated a term for this practice—to fend off Rome's
foes. This, in turn, led to inflation and debasing of Roman coinage, which
bred a lethal mix of apathy and angst that inspired many Romans to flee
politics and later the poleis ("city-states") of the
Empire, the urban foundation on which rested most of ancient life. With
that, actual power in Rome fell into the hands of local lords, and the
concept of shared Roman civilization itself came under siege.

But states have survived disasters far worse than any or all of these.
In sum, none of the theories or factors mentioned above explains why there's
no simple answer to the simple question, "Why did
Rome fall?" So, perhaps, it's not the answers that are flawed
but the question itself. To a scholar, that demands an all-out Aristotelian
response, a syllogism, an analysis of the question in terms of its principal
elements, which are three: why, Rome, fell.

IV. Conclusion: A New Question?

A. What's a "Rome"?

Since "why" cannot be answered until the other components of
the question have been determined, it's best not to start there. First,
then, when we say "Rome," what do we mean? The city? The empire?
Its government? Its people?

•If
by "Rome" we mean the city, invaders compromised that
several times in Roman history before its so-called "fall"
in 476 CE. That Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410, to the Vandals in
455, not to mention its other earlier "falls" such as the
one to that most-Roman-of-all-Romans, Julius Caesar himself (45 BCE),
and its near capitulation to Hannibal before that.
So if it's right to put the events of 476 in the same category—they
were hardly as destructive physically or psychologically as those which
preceded—the ouster of Romulus Augustulus can hardly labelled
"the fall of Rome," when compared to other ruinous
sieges and takeovers of the city.

•If by "Rome" we mean the Empire, only the Western
half of that is even at issue. The Eastern Empire stood for nearly a
millennium after 476, nearly as long again as classical Rome itself.
So Rome as Empire can't be right.

•If by "Rome" we mean the government, that
underwent drastic, often violent upheaval several times in Roman history,
including the establishment of the Republic early in Roman history,
the civil wars of the first century BCE, and the later reforms of the
Emperor Diocletian who virtually remade the Empire in the image of autocratic
Eastern regimes. That definition doesn't work either.

•Finally, if by "Rome" we mean the people, they
lived on past 476. They're still there. They're called Italians. So,
if the people of Rome ever "fell," apparently they got back
up again. That's out, too.

Whatever the answer, the question of which "Rome" fell in
476 lies at the heart of the problem, and most of the answers that have
been offered incline toward one but not all of the connotations the name
Rome can carry. Yet, all are inherent in the question, at least when it's
phrased so simply as "Why did Rome fall?" Clearly, any cogent
answer will have to address every "Rome" in Rome, so it's probably
best not to start there, either.

B. What's a "Falling?"

Hopefully, "fall" will prove a less obscure term than "Rome,"
and it does, unfortunately. "Fall" is quite clearly off-base,
in fact, a rather inept way to describe what happened in later ancient
Rome, since in most people's understanding "falling" implies
an accelerating descent leading to a cataclysmic crash followed by a big
ka-boom, like a tree being cut down. But that's really not how
things happened in late imperial Rome. Nothing went "boom"—"blaarhhh!"
maybe—but no explosion, no crash.

There must be a better metaphor and, if a derogatory term is in order—and
speaking positively about Rome in the fifth century seems out of the question,
without completely recasting the issue—it would be more suitable
perhaps to say Rome "dissolved." Professional dignity and common
sense, however, rule that out for most academics. Scholars, after all,
can hardly sit around seminar tables in serious discourse debating the
reasons why the ancient cookie "crumbled."

So then, how about "leak"? "Slide"? "Putrefy"?
All those present the same problem, though the gradualism inherent in
any of them represents a significant step toward accuracy in reflecting
the slow disintegration inherent in Rome's "fall," the far-from-instantaneous
process of wasting away that characterizes the end of classical antiquity.
Still, The Decline and Rot of Rome? It's hard to see that on
anyone's best-seller list.

C. Why?

So, with the implications of "Rome" unclear and, worse yet,
tied to the misguided metaphor of "falling," our inner Aristotles
can see that it's categorically pointless to proceed to "why."
The question is all too imprecise, too rotten-at-the-core to produce sensible
answers. It is, in fact, a loaded question, because it presupposes that
Rome did fall, encouraging us to think in what may turn out to
be inaccurate and unproductive ways. The real question is whether
Rome fell, not why?

D. Did Rome Fall?

True, the Roman state did something monumentally unpleasant in the 400's
CE, especially for those citizens of Rome acclimated to the benefits of
life in the Empire. That's why many Romans in the day left the city for
the countryside or monasteries or God's merciful embrace. But that change
did not happen overnight, or even over a decade. The historical data do
not support any firm break between late antiquity and the early
Middle Ages, certainly nothing like the social upheaval that followed
in the wake of the Black Death as it surged across Europe. There, the
impact of an explosive catastrophe can be seen in every corner of the
European landscape. But 476 doeis not equal 1347.

The historical truth, if any exists, is that Rome did not fall; rather,
it evolved. Roman coloni (farmers tied to the land) gradually
became Medieval serfs. The patron-and-client relationship, so central
in Roman society, slowly assumed the name and nature of the lord-and-vassal
bond, the social order underlying much of European society in the Middle
Ages. So, if Rome fell, it was only in slow motion, very slow
motion.

But change did come to Rome in the fifth century—as it
has to every society in every century of human history—and a particularly
drastic change it was. Many of the conventions which had once ruled the
ancient Romans' lives evaporated, never to re-emerge. Primarily, citizenship
in Rome offered little or no protection to its denizens, like membership
in a club that was now defunct. That, in turn, precipitated an even more
serious casualty, the loss of pride in being Roman, and of all things
that perhaps lies at the heart of the problem. When being Roman
no longer mattered, then being Greek or Dacian or German didn't either,
and if their Romanness stopped giving people a sense of military or economic
or racial superiority, what was the point of being Roman?

This bigotry, evidenced well before the fifth century, cuts to the heart
of the myth about Rome's fall. In simple terms, the nationalistic propaganda
of late Rome included a good element of racism which held that Germans,
while useful in some respects, were fundamentally aliens, something less
than Roman, to many in the day less than human. So when barbaric groups
of Germans first defeated the Romans in battle, then captured Rome itself
and finally assumed the mantle of Roman authority, it looked to those
who saw "Roman" and "German" as mutually exclusive
terms as if the Empire was no longer Roman, no longer an empire at all.
But this was, in fact, a rationalization, an excuse concocted by the late
Romans to cover their own complacency and lack of planning, which was,
to be frank, rooted in laziness. Thus, lethargy and bias lurk behind the
notion that 476 was a date of any supreme significance, much less the
Armageddon of the classical world, the moment when "Rome fell."

At the same time, however, the fallacy of choosing 476 as a crucial moment
in history—there is no year better for dating the "fall"—points
to something else very telling, that Rome for the most part survived the
crisis of the fifth century and in many respects weathered the circumstances
surrounding its purported "fall." For instance, Rome provided
the essential groundwork for the later triumphs of its successor states
and, in particular, the history of the Church argues strongly for an unbroken
line of development between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages,
the gradual evolution of Roman into Medieval structures. Indeed, many
Roman institutions were preserved through the Church, not least of all
its bureaucracy.

This indeed goes some way toward explaining why in its later days the
popes in Rome more than once stood up to defend the state, when Emperors
did not, as Leo I did when he confronted and turned Attila from Italy.
Churchmen like him were defending not only their homes but their home
institution, both Mother Rome and Mother Church. Seen this way, Rome did
not "fall" at all but passed its cultural legacy, the very heart
of its civilization, to the burgeoning Christian world.

So why then all the fixation on "fall," when the "evolution"
of Rome is a much more accurate way of expressing the transition Rome
underwent during the fifth century? The answer should be self-evident:
the "Evolution of Rome" is boring, if only because the message
lacks a moral core. In other words, saying something like "We must
never do something as evil as that or we will evolve like Rome,
and you don't want that, do you?" isn't a very effective
way to use history. It's far too easy for somebody to say "Well,
why not?"

In spite of all its inaccuracy, then, "falling" is a far more
palatable way for many people today to look at ancient Rome. In so complex
and consequential a situation as the woes suffered by Rome in the fifth
century where so little is clear and so many players cross the stage,
simplicity comes at a premium. "Fall" has the great advantage
over "evolve" of providing a straightforward and palpable vision
of Rome's purported demise, a salient, pointed metaphor that makes history
come alive. That is, to give Rome a "fall," a sudden death of
sorts, makes it seem all the more human, more closely related to things
people today know and see. People fall and die; Rome fell and died. It's
so simple, so accessible some part of it has to be right.

But
it's not. Such personification is fundamentally flawed, as invalid as
it is simplistic. Though made up of living organisms, societies are not
people and do not live or die as humans do. Many historians, including
the Roman annalist Livy, have had trouble stifling their laughter at the
purported "birth of Rome" featuring Romulus and Remus, clearly
fictional personifications of the fetal state. Why, then, is Rome's "fall"
and the dethroning of Romulus Augustulus, the birth-tale's teen namesake,
treated more seriously when it has all the earmarks of invented history,
too? Both these Romuli, indeed all of Rome's "little Romes,"
smack of myth-making concocted for the convenience of those with little
room in their lives for anything more than a superficial study of the
actual, messy, complicated what-really-happened.

In that light, the "fall of Rome" becomes a sort of game based
on humanity's strong but irrational need to personify past ages in order
to make them more understandable. Indeed, the general urge to create periods
of history stems from the same weakness. Seeking closure for Rome or any
past society is a student-and-professor game convenient for quiz-taking,
chart-making, sermonizing and remarkably little else.

E. "Die For Rome!"

If
any metaphor drawn from real life encompasses "Rome" and helps
us to understand why it "fell," perhaps it's best to describe
it not as a nation, not as a people, nor a government, nor even a city,
but an advertising campaign. Seen from the Nike-swoop perspective, "Get
Out There And Sacrifice Yourself For Rome!" is the single most successful
notion ever perpetrated in Western Civilization. Of all the impossibilities
facing Roman historians, one of the greatest has to be trying to count
the number of—to borrow a phrase from the American general George
Patton—"poor bastards" who went out there and died for
Rome. As witness to its marketing power, Rome's transcendent symbols—the
eagle, the laurel wreath, the fasces, the triumphal arch—still imbue
and predominate Western culture. In other words, we still live in the
afterglow of the Roman state's central message, "Rome is what matters,
so go out there and kill for it! Or die trying."

But ideas like that don't "live," at least not in the strictest
sense of the word—they don't have sharp transitions between life
and death the way people do—instead, ideas come and go, quickly
or slowly, and, what's most important here, they can be resurrected at
any moment, in a way that humans beings cannot. If Rome is essentially
an idea, then it's inaccurate to assert that it "fell," at least
in the sense that it "died." Whatever happened to the state
of Rome in the fifth century, the idea of Rome lived on, and
that was the essence of Rome itself.

Later history provides plenty of witnesses to this, if nothing else in
the number of people who have invoked Rome's legacy to advance their own
causes: Justinian and the Gothic Wars, Charlemagne and the Holy Roman
Empire, Russia's czars and Germany's Kaisers—both
are titles derived from the name Caesar—and, most horrifically,
Hitler and the Third Reich, the First Reich being Rome. That is, Hitler
tried to pass off his regime as some reincarnation of "Rome"
in the modern world. Fortunately for all, his empire came nowhere near
lasting a thousand years, but the allure of Rome eternal, unified, invincible,
has over and over proven irresistible, at least as the yardstick by which
megalomaniacs measure themselves.

The simple reality of Rome in late antiquity is that something big and
centralized in the West—and only in the West—broke
up into several smaller units, each resembling in many ways the larger
whole to which they had once belonged, but the image of Rome and the imagery
driving it lived on. Indeed, the majority of modern Western languages,
laws, religions, customs and culture are in some way fundamentally Roman,
making all of us by all fair standards modern Romans. And, until the last
traces of Roman civilization are erased and forgotten, Rome cannot be
said to have died—or fallen.